Be seen, heard, moved, and connected.
We founded FirstPerson Narratives (FirstPerson) to co-create and fund community programs where people who grew up experiencing family system trauma (FST) can connect, explore, and practice healing-centered storytelling initiatives that promote personal wellbeing, connection, and purpose as powerful agents for social change.
Feeling Safe Improves How Humans Feel, Think, and Operate.
When we feel safe, we have the capacity to connect and heal FST in ourselves, the families we create, and the communities where we live.
In the context of FirstPerson, we use FST as a general term to describe growing up and experiencing Adverse Childhood Experiences that cause chronic stress, resulting in relational, attachment, and developmental trauma.
Self-healing is a Fundamental Human Capacity
We founded FirstPerson Narratives (FirstPerson) to develop contextually relevant Lived Experience Leadership (LExL) programs where humans can connect, explore, and practice healing-centered storytelling initiatives that promote well-being, create connection, and cultivate the safety we all need to thrive.
FirstPerson Ensemble Work
FirstPerson Ensemble Work is a conceptual framework to cultivate LExL within expressive arts-based initiatives oriented towards the common good.
We envision paid training and mentorship opportunities to support individual well-being and collective healing for those who are, or seek to become, community well-being practitioners, teaching artists, and other actors contributing to therapeutic, expressive arts-based initiatives.
We use music and movement to improvise, collaborate, and play, experiencing safety and connection within ourselves and the group and deepening our capacity to stay grounded when we face complexity.
We can make healing visible, meaningful, shareable, and safe.
Our work can expand the core competencies humans need for personal and collective growth.
Connect & Build Safety
Express & Heal
We co-create context, applying real-time sense-making while expanding our capacity for verbal expression and fortifying essential skills like communication, critical thinking, perspective-taking, collaboration, self-direction, reinvention, and more!
We find our words and re-story our history and future with a restored sense of agency, purpose, and belonging.
Co-create Context
Healing-centered Engagement
Our efforts will bring together a multi-sector LExL workgroup that strives to improve opportunities for healing in the context of the community while supporting healing-centered engagement in all aspects of our work. Together, we’ll explore and integrate insights from evidence-informed and promising practices into experiences that can:
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Connect us through music, embodied movement, and Lived Experience storytelling.
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Cultivate our capacity to integrate our self-healing.
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Co-create safe containers where we can make sense of our lives while getting contextual insight into the people we came from.
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Support us as we harness and take control of our narratives and create individual and community legacies that support future generations.
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Use our stories to advocate for what’s needed to disrupt intergenerational hurt and promote generational healing.
The Problem: Healing is Possible but not Accessible.
FST-impacted adults do not have universal access to integrated, healing-centered solutions that attend to relational, attachment, interpersonal, and neurobiological contexts at the root of family system trauma.
Complex, nuanced, and interconnected barriers are woven into and created by siloed service offerings and fragmented healthcare systems.
Our solution can support access to equitable, culturally, and contextually relevant resources and long-term opportunities for well-being.
Co-designer Outreach
We seek to learn from and collaborate with thought leaders, wellbeing practitioners, teaching artists, program advisors, and other contributors involved in healing-centered engagement. To keep in touch, fill out the form, or email development@first-person.org.